2013 Speakers

Dr. Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Banting & Best Department of Medical Research and Professor of Molecular Genetics within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Charles H. Best Chair in Medical Research. She is also Director of the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research (the Donnelly Centre), an interdisciplinary biomedical research institute with a focus on technology development for post-genome biology, functional genomics, systems and computational biology and bioengineering. Dr. Andrews' current research interests include analysis of genetic interaction networks in budding yeast, using automated genetics platforms that include high content microscopy for systematic analysis of cell biological phenotypes. Her research is currently supported by the CIHR, the NIH, the Ontario Research Fund and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Dr. Berezin is focusing on novel mechanisms for optical imaging in medicine. His research interests lie in the design of fluorescent probes with high specificities to a variety of diseases for diagnostics and image-guided treatment. Current projects include the design of optical molecular and nanothermometers for measuring thermal fluctuations in vivo and controlling thermal ablation of cancer, synthesis of ROS/RNS nanoprobes for imaging injuries and developing novel optical imaging modalities in the extended near-infrared spectral range.

Dr. Berger is currently the senior scientist in The Plant Accelerator (www.plantaccelerator.org.au), headquarters of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility. She is central in developing technologies for the high throughput phenotyping of plants to quantify traits of salinity and drought response and using these technologies in a forward genetics approach to identify genes contributing to salinity and drought tolerance in crop plants.

Dr. Berger did her Ph.D. within the International Max-Planck Research School in Cologne on the regulation of glucosinolate biosynthesis in Arabidopsis but has now turned her attention to whole plant physiology and the use of non-destructive phenotyping to probe abiotic stress tolerance in crops such as wheat and barley.

Dr. Todd M. DeZwaan, Monsanto Company

Dr. DeZwaan's research interest is in high-throughput phenotyping for the discovery of agricultural products. He is currently the Strategy Lead for the Monsanto Automated Greenhouse, a facility that provides plant trait physiological characterization for Monsanto's Biotechnology product pipeline. He has a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania, and has worked for 15 years in the Ag-Biotech industry, developing and leading in vitro and controlled environment screening efforts focused on crop improvement.

Dr. Dixit is the Manager of Business Development at PhenoFab® (www.phenofab.com), a joint facility of KeyGene and LemnaTec providing digital plant phenotyping services worldwide. She identifies and drives new projects in PhenoFab, brings innovation to its product pipeline, and offers client-driven solutions. She has a Ph.D. in the area of plant molecular genetics from Wageningen University- The Netherlands where she researched on abiotic stress resistances in crops. She worked as a scientist at KeyGene N.V. where she, with her team, developed non-destructive protocols on HTP phenotyping platforms to make High-Tec plant images and data analysis and extracted and exploited invaluable information with the genetic data resources, bridging the gap between genotyping and phenotyping.

Dr. Furbank leads the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre (HRPPC), a National Facility in Canberra Australia which has developed and deployed novel phenotyping technologies for crop and model plants in controlled environments and the field. Dr. Furbank’s research aims to improve crop yield and product quality by researching carbon partitioning and photosynthesis. Dr. Furbank has worked for 30 years on C4 photosynthesis and his recent research focuses on improving yield potential in cereal and biofuel crops through increasing photosynthetic capacity and efficiency using Phenomics, biochemical, and molecular approaches.

Dr. Michael Gore recently joined the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University as an Associate Professor, after three years of work as a Research Geneticist with the USDA-ARS at U.S. ALARC in Maricopa, AZ. His research combines population genomics and quantitative genetics to dissect complex trait variation in cotton, Brassica napus, maize, and guayule. In addition, he has developed field-based, high-throughput phenotyping tools to rapidly measure plant physiological and morphological traits under high temperatures and water-limited conditions.

Dr. Iyer-Pascuzzi received a Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Environmental Biology from U.C.- Berkeley, a Master’s in Plant Pathology, and a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics, both from Cornell University. During her post-doctoral work at Duke, she developed an imaging and phenotyping system for non-destructively quantifying root system architecture and used systems biology approaches to investigate the intersection of root development and environmental stress. She joined Purdue’s Department of Botany and Plant Pathology in January 2013 where her research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms and gene regulatory networks underlying root responses to biotic stresses.

Dr. Kramer is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the MSU DOE Plant Research Lab at Michigan State University. His research focuses on how the biophysical and biochemical machinery of photosynthesis functions in living organisms. His work has resulted in the development of new high throughput and high resolution tools for assessing photosynthesis in plants and algae. He will discuss recent work using these tools on photosynthetic responses to dynamic environmental conditions that reveals previously obscure gene functions.

Dr. Logan develops advanced methods to quantify and mine the rich information present in cellular images to yield discoveries and, ultimately, therapies. He also works on machine learning software to allow biologists to statistically analyze data from images of stained cells. Logan is interested in the role of context in image and motion processing, especially distinguishing foreground from background, as well as self-motion from object motion, when analyzing images.

Logan joined the Broad Institute in July 2007 after completing his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Rochester and conducting postdoctoral research at MIT. Logan received a B.S. in physics and astronomy from University of Michigan and an M.S. in physics from University of Maryland.

Dr. Michael Malone, Monsanto Company

Dr. Malone’s research has focused on developing tools to quantify the influence of molecular and cellular processes on whole-organism physiology. His tripartite interest in phenotyping, computing, and automation brought Dr. Malone to Monsanto, where he led an interdisciplinary team to develop the high-throughput crop imaging systems used in Monsanto’s Automated Greenhouse. He currently manages scientific partnerships to discover and develop technologies to make agriculture more productive and sustainable. Dr. Malone holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Case Western Reserve University and was an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Peterson is a chemical biologist whose research utilizes high-throughput screening technologies to discover new drug candidates for cardiovascular and nervous system disorders. Unlike conventional drug discovery programs that utilize simplified, in vitro assays, Dr. Peterson’s laboratory conducts their screens with living zebrafish. He is the recipient of a EUREKA award from the National Institutes of Health and is the Charles and Ann Sanders MGH Research Scholar.

Robert Pless is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focus is data driven approach to understanding motion and change in video, with a current focus on long term time-lapse imagery. Dr. Pless has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1994 and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000. He chaired the IEEE Workshop on Omnidirectional Vision and Camera Networks (OMNIVIS) in 2003, the MICCAI Workshop on Manifold Learning in Medical Imagery in 2008 and received the NSF CAREER award in 2006. analysis.

Dr. Poland is a Research Geneticist with USDA-ARS and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Agronomy at Kansas State University. Dr. Poland’s research group is located on the KSU campus with field research across the state. Dr. Poland currently supervises three graduate students and a post-doctoral scholar and sits on the graduate committees of five other students at Kansas State University and Colorado State University, where he holds affiliate faculty status.

Research in Dr. Poland’s group is focused on wheat genetics and germplasm improvement. They are currently developing new marker technologies for use in breeding, diversity studies, and association genetics. In collaboration with public breeding programs, Dr. Poland is exploring the use of genomic selection methods in wheat breeding. In the area of germplasm development, Dr. Poland’s group is focused on developing new breeding lines with resistance to the major pests of wheat including stem rust, strip rust, leaf rust and Hessian Fly. Dr. Poland’s lab is developing high-throughput phenotyping approaches for field-based evaluation of breeding lines with the primary focus being genetic characterization of heat and drought tolerance and development of improved germplasm.

Dr. Spalding’s interest in studying seedling growth and development from a biophysical perspective were sparked while an undergraduate at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, pursued through doctoral studies at Penn State, and through postdoctoral work at Yale. While a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Spalding’s research has retained a focus on seedling growth and development but the experimental approaches range from patch clamp electrophysiology of individual channel molecules, to statistical genetic analyses of development in populations quantified through image analysis.

Dr. Tanguay is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology and the Director of the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory. He received his B.A. in Biology from California State University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California-Riverside and postdoctoral training in developmental toxicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over the past several years he has developed automated high throughput instrumentation to accelerate phenotype discovery in zebrafish. Phenotypic anchoring coupled with the inherent molecular and genetic advantages of zebrafish are used to define the mechanisms by which chemicals, drugs, and nanoparticles interact with and adversely affect vertebrate development and function.

Originally trained as a chromosome biologist at the University of Georgia, Dr. Topp’s current research focuses on root and rhizome phenotyping in crop plants, and characterizing the environmental and genetic factors that condition their growth. As a USDA-NIFA postdoctoral scholar at Duke University, he led the development of a high-throughput 3D root imaging and analysis pipeline and applied it to map regions of the rice genome controlling root architecture. By integrating these efforts with natural variation and modern sequencing methods, he aims to facilitate our understanding of how genotype directs phenotype for belowground traits of agricultural importance. He will join the Danforth Center faculty in September 2013 where he will continue to develop technologies and infrastructure that enable the analysis of subterranean structures through time.

Rick van de Zedde is a business developer for Intelligent Food Systems at the Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research Institute, where he has worked since 2004. His background is in Artificial Intelligence with a focus on imaging and robotics. In 2002, he graduated with a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Groningen. Since 2006 he has been a coordinator of GreenVision, the centre of expertise for image processing in the agrifood industry (http://greenvision.wur.nl). He also takes an active role in research. In 2011, he was head of the MARVIN-project in which he and his team developed a tomato seedling inspection approach based on 3D reconstruction. In the current EU project EPPN, he is the leader of the “Novel Instrumentation for Plant Phenotyping” work package. EPPN and other on-going projects explore the potential of fast 3D shape analysis of plants and vision-guided robotics, areas in which Wageningen UR has recently made significant breakthroughs.

Dr. Vogel has led a group at the USDA-ARS Western Regional Research Center for the past ten years. His research is focused on using Brachypodium distachyon and closely related species as model grasses with an emphasis on topics relevant to biomass crops. Creating experimental resources (e.g. genome sequences, efficient transformation systems, over 20,000 T-DNA lines) has been a major focus of his research. Dr. Vogel is also leading a collaborative project with the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Facility in Canberra, Australia to phenotypically characterize natural accessions and homozygous T-DNA lines. For more information visit: http://brachypodium.pw.usda.gov/